Artist. Producer.Educator | Connector of dots…

Preeminent Improvisational Vocalist, Author, Producer, GRAMMY-nominated musician, and multi-disciplinary fine artist is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow for Music Composition (the first emcee to be granted a Guggenheim for music composition), Halcyon Arts Fellow, and Nicholson Arts Fellow, has been a TEDxWDC presenter, speaking on “collaboration and the creative economy”.and has served as Artist in Residence at Music Meeting in Nijmegen, NL. He can be heard on over 60 titles spanning: Jazz, Hip Hop, Rock, and R&B. About his book "You Are Ketchup: and Other Fly Music Tales" (Globe Pequot) the Washington Post writes “written in a tone so conversational you can practically hear it in your ear, “You Are Ketchup” feels like a megadose of straight advice from a muso-mentor who’s been there. And, of course, Kokayi has been all over the place..”

Kokayi has taught and facilitated workshops at the School of Improvisational Music teaching vocal improvisation as it relates to Jazz and Hip Hop, at Monash (Melbourne, AU), Universidade Lusíada (Lisbon, PT), Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, and San Francisco State. He is a collaborator and mentor with the international arts program OneBeat and has worked as a freelance music emissary with the U.S. State Department. He is the Chief Ideator and co-curator of BeatsnBeans: a discussion series on creativity, coffee culture, and the re-imagining of creative spaces. Kokayi considers himself an emcee and performer first, no matter the medium, he allows his love for the lexicon of artistic language to control the narrative of creating and his love for the catharsis of performance to captivate his audiences across the globe. Kokayi continues to act as a music producer and performer currently touring with his own band as well as with Ambrose Akinmusire, Terri Lynne Carrington + Social Science, Whose Hat is This?, Ego Mondo, Nate Smith +Kinfolk, Quite Sane, Sanity, and with MacArthur Fellow Dafnis Prieto, while also serving as an Arts and Creative consultant for Interledger Foundation designing their FUTURE|Money arts-centered grants and projects around financial equity in the open payments and web3 space.

As a Recording Academy member, Kokayi served as Governor, Vice-President, President, and Trustee of the Washington DC Chapter of NARAS as well as Co-Chairing the National President's Committee and National Planning and Governance Committee and serving as Board member of the National Producers and Engineers Committee and Awards and Nominations committees. An advocate for the indigenous music of DC he also helped facilitate the addition of go-go as a genre for the Regional Roots category allowing go-go music to be codified as a genre for the first time in Recording Academy history. Kokayi’s forthcoming eponymous album is currently in production with a planned release in Spring 2024.

Kokayi’s forthcoming eponymous album is currently in production with a planned release in Spring 2024.

“My work is an amalgamation of his life experiences as filtered through, DC, Go-Go, and the African/African American cultural influences created and passed on throughout the African diaspora.”